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Democratization
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Remembering violence: the

role of apology and dialogue
in Turkey's democratization
process
a
Mneesha Gellman
a
Political Science , Northwestern University , Illinois ,
USA
Published online: 16 Apr 2012.

To cite this article: Mneesha Gellman (2013) Remembering violence: the role of apology
and dialogue in Turkey's democratization process, Democratization, 20:4, 771-794, DOI:
10.1080/13510347.2012.668437

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2012.668437

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 Democratization, 2013
Vol. 20, No. 4, 771 – 794, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2012.668437

Remembering violence: the role of apology and dialogue in

Turkey’s democratization process
Mneesha Gellman∗

Political Science, Northwestern University, Illinois, USA

(Received June 2011; final version received October 2011)
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In this article I ask the question: how do citizens use memories of violence in
dialogue with a democratizing Turkish state? To address this, I unpack how
memories of violence influence solidarity communities in addition to those
who are direct descendents of survivors. I also examine how these solidarity
communities are widening political space for contemporary dialogue about
the Armenian Catastrophe. To demonstrate the connection between memory
and political participation, I identify three discursive moments where
Turkish and Armenian citizens invoke memory in dialogue with one other
and with the state. I use the 2009 online campaign for a Turkish apology to
address the Armenian Catastrophe, the aftermath of the murder of Hrant
Dink in 2007, and a controversial 2005 academic conference on the events
of 1915 as focal points to discuss how memory impacts the way people
behave as citizens. My argument is twofold: first, elite-led solidarity
networks play an integral role in shaping the discursive space between
citizens, the state, and the international community; and second, dialogue
about memory can grow space for citizen participation in Turkey.

Keywords: Armenian; Turkey; memory; dialogue; apology

They have flour, butter, and sugar. Why then cannot they make a cake? –
popular Turkish sage Nasrettin Hoca1

Introduction
At a conference on minority rights in Turkey in 2002, Hrant Dink, an ethnically
Armenian2 journalist who founded the bilingual Armenian newspaper Agos, and
who had lived in Istanbul since he was seven years old, made a statement for
which he was later prosecuted by the Turkish state. Asked what he thought
about the Turkish primary school requirement of reciting the phrase, ‘I am a
Turk, I am honest, I am hardworking’, he said that ‘although he was honest
and hardworking, he was not a Turk’.3 For this statement, as well as for a
2005 Agos column in which he critically discussed Armenian-Turkish
relations and used the word ‘genocide’, Dink was prosecuted under Turkey’s
Penal Code 301, which defines ‘denigrating Turkishness’ as a crime; Dink

∗
Email: mneesha@u.northwestern.edu

# 2013 Taylor & Francis

 772 M. Gellman
responded that ‘racism was the denigration’.4 This incident showcases the inter-
relationship between citizenship and identity politics for ethnic minorities and
also draws attention to problems that internally hegemonic states face in
democratization.
The Turkish Constitution allows freedom of thought and expression of
those thoughts,5 though there are many articles in the Constitution, such as
Articles 14 and 15, which allow the state to curtail these and other freedoms.
The Turkish state wields not only constitutional or legal, court-based authority
over its population, but also cultural dominance and the ability to use fear as a
silencing tool. Dink’s case was still in court at the time he was assassinated on
19 January 2007 in front of the Agos office in Istanbul. The murder, carried
out by Ogün Samast, an unemployed teenager from Trabzon who has been
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linked to ultra-nationalists and gendarme conspirators,6 is in fact connected

to a much wider web of ‘deep state’ or paramilitary repression against min-
orities and leftists in Turkey that is currently being investigated in the Ergen-
ekon trials.7
Today, Turkey needs to allow free speech to increase its credibility as a
democracy, but the Turkish government also appears to be profoundly threa-
tened by freedom of expression. This is because individual actors, and the soli-
darity movement of academic elites that advocate on behalf of Turkey’s ethnic
minorities, use free speech to name the quotidian inequalities that minorities
experience. By bringing to the public’s attention the fact that Armenians
living in Turkey do not identify as Turkish, Dink challenged both the consti-
tutional and cultural assumptions of Turkish nationalism – that all who are
born in Turkey identify as Turkish.8 His circle of colleagues invoked the out-
pouring of support at his funeral as the critical historical juncture at which the
momentum for real dialogue coalesced into a solidarity movement.
In this article I explore the process by which an elite-led social movement chal-
lenges state hegemony. Specifically, I ask the question: how do citizens use mem-
ories of violence to make rights claims on the democratizing Turkish state? To
address this, I examine the coalitions of intellectuals and activists who attempt
to widen political space for contemporary dialogue about the actions of the
Ottoman state towards Ottoman Armenians in 1915. My underlying argument is
twofold: first, that elite-led solidarity networks play an integral role in shaping
the discourse in democratization processes; and second, that memory-based
rights claims expand the space for citizen participation in Turkey. Although
more recently studies of emotion and sequencing have been considered in the con-
tentious politics literature,9 the scholarship on dialogue about memory and its con-
nection to citizenship participation remains limited, and my work attempts to
address this gap.
The outline of the article is as follows: first, I present the research puzzle and
outline the key concepts used to address the research question. Conceptually, this
includes memory, identity, violence, and citizenship, and theorizing the interaction
between these components makes up the heart of the article. To illustrate the theory,
 Democratization 773
in the second half of the article I present three elite-led moments of dialogue that
have drawn on memories of violence and might affect how Armenians participate
as citizens. Working in reverse chronological order, the first project addressed is the
apology petition of 2009, an initiative of Turkish people apologizing to Armenians
for the events of 1915. The second dialogue moment is the funeral march after
Hrant Dink’s assassination, and the third dialogue moment is a conference about
1915 that took place at Bilgi University in 2005. In all three of these moments,
Turks and Armenians gathered together to discuss the interpretation of historical
narratives about state violence. These three attempts at widening the space for dia-
logue explicitly use remembered violence as a catalyst for action and have, I argue,
left lasting legacies regarding the quality of debate about pluralism in Turkey. In
addition to drawing from the contentious politics and democratization literatures,
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data is included from interviews with scholars and journalists during my fieldwork
in Turkey. Finally, I conclude with a plea to incorporate the role of memory, par-
ticularly memories of violence, in future research about dialogue during
democratization.

The research puzzle

In this section I present the scope of the research and define key terms that are used
throughout the article. The specific moments of dialogue probed in this article are
conceptualized as mechanisms through which memory is able to exert an effect on
the participation of people in the democratization process writ large. In the conten-
tious politics literature, ‘mechanisms’ are occurrences or events that change
relations between individuals or grouped units of analysis similarly across different
contexts.10 In this article, dialogue is defined as a process that promotes verbal or
textual interaction between parties who would otherwise avoid communicating
with each other. Although the kind of interaction that takes place in dialogue
may vary greatly, dialogue moments consistently promote interaction and foster
an exchange of perspectives. Such moments, I posit, may be useful in reanimating
relationships that have heretofore been marked exclusively by hostility. Dialogue
opens the possibility for a reframing of past events through mutual discussion and
negotiation of memory.
As those with access to power and resources, Turkish elites are well positioned
to renegotiate how violence is memorialized in consultation with Armenians
whose collective memories are more directly affected by the results. Without
delving into the arguments about top-down versus bottom-up generated
change,11 it is assumed in this article that elite-led solidarity networks play a for-
mative role in opening up the dialogue arena to new mechanisms that will
reframe memories of violence in Turkey.12 Though elites are more fully defined
further on, it is important to keep in mind that the actors I am concerned with
have real access to power, in that they are well educated agenda-setters who can
shape the discourse of the country through use of media and academic institutional
forums.
 774 M. Gellman
The connections between memory, identity, dialogue, and citizenship are all
vital to the story told in this article; therefore, I want to make the links explicit
here. The capacity to remember collectively is integral to identity formation and
maintenance because collective memories contain the ontologies and epistem-
ologies that people use to reinforce their senses of self, situated in community.
To deny the validity of a collectively held memory that constitutes a portion of
identity diminishes that identity through a manipulation of power. Though
power as coercion often exists even in the most democratic of states, in the
context of a democratizing Turkey, using state power to deny memories of violence
that have been central to identity undermines Armenian claims to belonging. By
casting Armenians as both ‘outside’ the acceptable state narrative of memory,
but simultaneously as needing to be ‘inside’ Turkishness to be acceptable as citi-
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zens, both the Constitution and daily rhetoric diminish the Armenian sense of
self-belonging that would encourage political participation.
The Minority Rights Group report on Turkey documents that minorities ‘are
seen as “foreigners” and any advocacy for their protection, particularly by Euro-
pean states, is seen as interference in internal affairs’.13 However, not all minorities
wear the foreigner label equally. Sunni Kurds, for example, in exchange for silen-
cing their Kurdish ethnic claims, have been more able to assimilate in Turkey as
full citizens based on their Sunni Muslim religion that they share with the vast
majority of Turks.14 Armenian Orthodox Christianity, on the other hand, essen-
tially renders Armenians incapable of full assimilation, thus perpetuating their
foreigner status even though generations of Armenian families have resided in
Turkey.
But religion is not the sole issue that complicates full citizen participation by
Armenians in Turkey. By denying the memory of the Armenian Catastrophe, the
state perpetuates a narrative that disempowers Armenians by casting doubt on a
foundational component of their identity. This paralyzes the Armenian community
to a substantial degree, stymieing their political participation by weakening an
epistemological attribute central to a common identity that could otherwise be
used to mobilize. Denial of the 1915 events by Turkey has had larger diplomatic
consequences as well, stalling the controversial reopening of the Turkey-
Armenia border in 2009. In the end the deal was undone by the issue of control
over Nagorno Karabakh, a disputed territory in Azerbaijan long claimed by
Armenia, with Turkey supporting Azerbaijan’s claim. However, the lack of
apology from the Turkish state for the events of 1915 fed pessimism about the
border negotiations among Armenians in both countries.
Less as a remedy and more as a starting point, I propose that dialogue moments
can open communication channels to begin reversing this problematic pattern of
disempowerment and deadlock. This logic draws from the work of Melissa
Nobles in her book about how official apologies can influence the way national
membership is experienced.15 Nobles defines ‘membership in a political commu-
nity’ as taking shape legally, politically, and affectively16:
 Democratization 775
The legal status of one’s membership as a citizen (whether one is or is not a citizen)
profoundly affects one’s feeling of belonging, the political rights one may exercise,
and one’s perception and treatment by others. Conversely, feelings of detachment
or satisfaction with membership may lead to lesser or greater participation,
which may lead to the further loss or enhancement of political rights.17

My argument rests on Nobles’ assertion that whether or not people perceive them-
selves as belonging can affect their behaviours of political detachment or engage-
ment. First, defining citizenship as ethnically based in Turkishness, as seen in the
Turkish Constitution, alienates those such as Hrant Dink who do not identify in this
way yet participate actively in civic life. Second, denial of the events of 1915 has
served to diminish Armenians’ sense of belonging in Turkey, and has led to politi-
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cal non-participation that does not further a minority rights agenda. To some extent
denial has created non-identification by Armenians with the state, a phenomenon
that has been experienced in other post-violence countries. In Chile, for example,
‘[p]eople do not find in the political realm the symbolic representations that could
serve them as a mirror through which to name the past and thus apprehend it. Given
this lack of words and symbols, they opt for silence’.18
The moments of dialogue presented in this article address this silenced percep-
tion of self by affirming identity. By publicly recognizing what happened to Arme-
nians in 1915 as a potent site of identity memorialization, elite Turkish solidarity
coalitions impact the sense of Armenian belonging that in turn can foster increased
political participation for this specific population, but also the citizenry at large as
democratic practices become more mainstream. Dialogue moments, then, affirm
memory-driven identity, and the resulting sense of belonging expands the potential
for greater participation in the political arena. The dependent variable or outcome,
namely participation, may take the form of institutionally channelled behaviour
such as voting and petitioning, or extra-institutional behaviour such as public
protest. These connections are not only potent for Turkey’s internal democratiza-
tion process, but also for its role in the international community.

The politics of remembering

In this section I provide the theoretical heart of the article by exploring concepts of
memory and citizenship and how they function in relation to political behaviour.
Memory as a cerebral function can be defined as the ‘mental faculty of retaining
and recalling past experience’,19 but this is inadequate for operationalizing
memory as the basis for political action. The anthropological and psychological lit-
erature describes memories as ‘never simply records of the past, but. . .interpretive
reconstructions that bear the imprint of local narrative conventions, cultural
assumptions, discursive formations and practices, and the social contexts of
recall and commemoration’.20 Memory has a long history as a defining character-
istic of selfhood. Aristotle philosophized about its role in human formation and
believed that humans were formed through learning, which shaped our brains
and made us more mature as we remembered.21 Thus, rather than mere
 776 M. Gellman
neurological processing, memories both reinforce and are produced through narra-
tives, informing the ontologies and epistemologies we use to navigate our lives as
individual and social beings.
Definitions of memory often convey the sense that one is retaining an experi-
ence that one has lived through, whereas the literature on collective memory has
established that memory may pass experiences on, both horizontally across
social and geographic groups, and vertically down through the generations. The
memories of violence that I explore enact both spatial and temporal movement, sig-
nifying that contemporary memory keepers may be thousands of miles, or multiple
generations, away from the exploitation of power that first created the violent
memory.
In this article, actors are rememberers, defined as direct descendents and soli-
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darity community members, and forgetters, who constitute the majority of the
Turkish public and successive government administrations, who routinely
deliver both informal and official statements denying the events of 1915 as proble-
matic for the national psyche or the nation’s democratization process. A primary
process explored here is the coalition-building between Armenian descendents
of violence survivors and those non-Armenians who stand in solidarity. Solidarity
communities – groups of actors who take up advocacy on behalf of people with
less access to resources or power, in this case Armenians – actively participate
in Turkey to challenge the suppression of collective memories that are integral
to Armenian identity.
These solidarity communities are composed of what Tarrow labels ‘rooted
cosmopolitanists’, who he describes as people ‘rooted in specific national contexts,
but who engage in contentious political activities that involve them in transnational
networks of contacts and conflicts’.22 The rooted cosmopolitanists who join with
Armenians to form solidarity coalitions can be defined as intellectual elites: aca-
demics, journalists, and non-governmental organization (NGO) workers who
have access to media, financial resources, and a capacity to frame the issues in
ways that resonate with the larger international community. Generally, this
segment of the elite population: (1) resides on the political left, (2) has more
exposure to their Western counterparts than only Turkish-speaking and Turkish-
educated elites, (3) is multi-lingual, often speaking English, French, or German,
due in part to being educated outside of Turkey, and (4) is also politically involved
in Turkey’s other divisive issues, for example, Kurdish autonomy and religious
freedom characterized by the headscarf debate. Not only do these elites know
how to capitalize on political opportunities like Turkey’s European Union (EU)
membership application, and mobilize resources necessary to stage conferences
or publish books, they can also translate their message to the English, French,
and German-speaking world. Indeed, the apology message online is posted in 13
languages.
Though Turkey is home to many different kinds of intellectual elites, based on
these four characteristics above, I limit my focus in this project to elites coming
distinctly from the left. Elite counterparts among Islamists and ultra-nationalists
 Democratization 777
hold different agendas and are not currently prominent actors in facilitating real
dialogue about the events of 1915, and therefore are not my focus here (though
their powerful roles in other aspects of Turkish politics should not be dismissed).
While there are certainly exceptions, the elite solidarity members in this article
behave and perceive themselves more as global citizens than their Kemalist or Isla-
mist counterparts who often support, at least tacitly, the state’s policy of denial and
confine their social networks to within Turkey. Of course, many leftist elites may
have originally been inspired by Kemalist traditions of secularism and modernism,
but ultimately they seek more international values than those espoused, for
example, by the Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP). The most tangible
way this differentiation plays out is in the relationship of different elite groups
to nationalism. While leftist Turkish intellectuals are by no means a homogenous
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group, they do generally criticize Turkish nationalism in a way that sets them apart
from other intellectual elites.
In addition to the formation of solidarity coalitions, a secondary process in this
democratization dialogue is the solidarity coalition’s relationship with the state.
The actors engage in several moments of dialogue that contest official policy in
the arena of memory. The elite-led coalitions facilitating this contestation are inte-
gral to enabling active citizen participation by less powerful social groups. Tilly
sees democratization processes entailing the formation of coalitions between
social classes to bring marginalized people closer to centres of power.23 Although
a portion of the Armenian community has formed this kind of coalition with the
Turkish leftist intellectual elite, there has been little exploration of this coalition
as a participation promoting tool.
This article does not focus on the Turkish state, but it is worth mentioning
because the state plays a monumental role in both the perpetuation of interethnic
hostilities and the potential for reconciliation between ethnic groups. However,
the notion of the state issuing an official apology remains ephemeral. This is
because the Turkish state is bound to its historic policy of Turkification as modern-
ization and therefore chooses not to recognize an event like the Armenian Cata-
strophe because such recognition would cast a negative pall over the state-
building project and the legacy of Kemalism. Moreover, the state is bound to the
public opinion its policies have manufactured, and deviance from the official dis-
course at this point could be labelled anti-nationalist. Rather than try to change this
reality, the leftist Turkish elite has stepped up to offer the affirmation of identity
memorialization that the state is unable to do by apologizing to Armenians.
Although there is great concern in the political apology literature about who has
the right to forgive on behalf of whom,24 it is less contested that citizens may apol-
ogize to each other if their state is unwilling to participate in the ritual. Often elite
pressure is needed to foment behaviour change among states and civil society alike,
and such seems to be the case in Turkey.
While the role of the state in apology as mentioned above is important, the
central focus of this article is the way the Armenian community has used memories
of violence in identity construction and political behaviour. Around the world
 778 M. Gellman
people create and maintain identity through narratives, which are the stories that
people tell about themselves and that are reinforced by the social webs in which
individual actors are embedded. Armenian citizen participation in Turkey is influ-
enced by the memories of violence that shape the collective identities of this group.
Related to this, ethnic minority communities such as Armenians that have experi-
enced state-initiated violence use collective memory as cultural legacies to com-
memorate grievances, which in turn are used as identity rallying points.
Furthermore, the subjectivity of memory – the recalling of an experience across
space and time – will vary depending on the socially constructed narratives of
the rememberers.25 The events of 1915 within the Armenian community ‘produced
an exceptionally strong feeling of ethnic cultural cohesiveness that provided Arme-
nian intellectuals with reference points, causes, and an avid audience’.26 Such
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reference points serve a collectively held historical memory that is denied by the
Turkish state.27
To create collective memory, however, there must first be collective identity,
where people perceive that they are more similar to each other than to people of
another group.28 From the conflict resolution literature, we know that when
confronted with an identity-threatening conflict, people will rely on their in-
group identity all the more fiercely.29 Thus, collective identity strengthens in the
aftermath of identity-targeted violence, and even more so when collective memories
of the violence, perceived as memorials to the victims, are challenged. In the case of
Turkey, the Armenian community has clung to its collective identity and its collec-
tive memories, which put it in direct opposition to the state. This stance has hindered
full citizen participation by Armenians in the democratizing Turkish state. The offi-
cial negation of memory perceived as fundamental to group identity results in a
silencing and sense of detachment for that group. Detachment, re-invoking
Nobles’ point about the impact of apologies, may lead to less civic participation.30
The role of memory in citizen behaviour becomes particularly pertinent with
the added layer of historic state-driven violence. Although I refer more generally
to ‘violence’ throughout this article, the specific definition of violence utilized
comes from Charles Tilly’s work on coordinated destruction as a sub-category
of collective violence. Tilly defines coordinated destruction as occurring when
‘persons or organizations specialized in the deployment of coercive means under-
take programs of actions that damage persons and/or objects’.31 Furthermore, he
allows that coordinated destruction can lead to genocide, in which attackers ident-
ify victims based on heritage categorization.32 Targeted bodily harm of Armenian-
Ottomans by the Ottoman state – the killing of upwards of one million people –
fits into Tilly’s definition of coordinated attacks and demonstrates the coercive
relationships that then became stored in the memories of survivors, their descen-
dents, and their solidarity communities.33
Because of the sensitive nature of the topic it is important to clarify the terms
employed to delimit the ‘incident’ itself. Depending on the audience, many vag-
aries are used to hint at past ethnic violence, such as the ‘Armenian question’,
the ‘Armenian problem’, or the ‘catastrophe of 1915’.34 While many scholars
 Democratization 779
have debated terminology around 1915, sociologist Fatma Müge Göçek concisely
presents the spectrum of Turkish words used to talk about what happened to the
Ottoman-Armenian population in Turkey, with translations ranging from ‘forced
migration’ to ‘mass killing’ or ‘massacre’.35 US-based Turkish historian Taner
Akçam consistently deploys the word genocide to describe what Ottoman Turks
did to the Armenian population in 1915.36 Defined by Article II of the 1948
United Nations Convention on Genocide, acts of murder or violence ‘committed
with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious
group’ reflect the reality that Akçam says Ottoman Armenians faced from
Ottoman Turks. A member of the forced diaspora,37 Akçam presents detailed docu-
mentation to justify his use of the term.38 Moreover, it has been established by the
larger international community as an appropriate description of what happened to
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Ottoman Armenians in 1915.39 Nonetheless, the term ‘genocide’ remains highly

controversial in Turkey today, and using it can shut down dialogue prematurely
with those who would otherwise be open to discussing ethnic minority relations
and political participation. Though ‘massacre’ can connote the seriousness of the
violence against Ottoman Armenians in a somewhat less polarizing way, ‘cata-
strophe’ is the expression employed in the 2009 apology petition itself. Since ‘cat-
astrophe’ is the term I often used during my fieldwork in Turkey to open dialogue
with a range of people, it is also the term employed in this article to describe the
events of 1915.
As with labels for violence, the body count of Armenians killed by Ottomans
varies based on the source and is highly contested. Common estimates are that
roughly 600,000–1,500,000 Armenians were killed in the deportations and massacres
from 1915–1922,40 though the Turkish government contends there were from
300,000–600,000 casualties.41 While exact dates and figures are still up for interpret-
ation by scholars, the events of 1915 have left an indelible mark on the Turkish psyche.
The myriad ways that one event can be framed through basic word choice or
quantified numerically highlight the importance of elite intellectuals in the con-
testation of memory. Academics are often the producers of words, theories, and
statistics that frame reality for the rest of the population through media and edu-
cation forums. As the correct label and body count for the events of 1915 is con-
tinually renegotiated, elites, as part of broader solidarity coalitions, are trying to
facilitate dialogue in the arena of memory that will prevent the Turkish state
from hegemonically characterizing the Armenian Catastrophe as self defence.

Defining citizenship
Citizenship is taken to signify the status of a person with the duties, rights, and pri-
vileges of being bound to a specific territory governed by a state. This draws on
Tilly’s contractual definition:

Citizenship designates a set of mutually enforceable claims relating to categories of

persons to agents of governments . . . citizenship has the character of a contract:
 780 M. Gellman
variable in range, never completely specified, always depending on unstated assump-
tions about context, modified by practice, constrained by collective memory, yet
ineluctably involving rights and obligations sufficiently defined that either party is
likely to express indignation and corrective action when the other fails to meet expec-
tations built into the relationship.42

Yet it has been the inability of Armenians to obtain this ‘corrective action’ that
highlights the fragility of their citizenship. Though in theory each individual is
bound to the same set of duties and rights as the Turkish Sunni majority, minorities
as communities often lack the power to back up their rights claims. In part, this may
be the case in Turkey because of minority groups’ small numbers, but it may also
have to do with the policy of Turkification that has characterized the development
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of the modern Turkish state.

Minorities, ethnically and religiously defined, do exist in Turkey.43 Out of
approximately 77 million citizens of Turkey, roughly 70– 75% are ethnically
Turkish, 18% are Kurdish, and 7 – 12% are ‘others’ such as Greeks, Armenians,
Caucasians, Caferis, Rum, and Laz.44 While the US government’s ‘CIA World
Factbook’ does not distinguish the Alevis from what it classifies as a 99.8%
Sunni Muslim population, more discerning sources say that of the Turkish popu-
lation, 10– 33% of the total population are Alevi, with a breakdown of the remain-
ing non-Muslims at 60,000 Armenians, 23,000 Jews, 16,000 Rum Orthodox
Christians, and some 15,000 Syrian Orthodox Christians.45 The temptation to over-
look the potent diversity that exists both within Sunnis and among Turkish citizens
should be resisted, as such homogenization obscures the real challenges that exist
for the Turkish state to meet not just the needs of the majority population but those
of the state’s most neglected and oppressed citizens.
To be clear, Article 10 of the Turkish Constitution does protect the rights of all
citizens from discrimination regardless of race or language.46 However, Article 66
of the Constitution manipulates the definition of citizenship in such a way that all
those ‘bound to the Turkish state’ are considered Turkish.47 While straightforward
at face value, this territorially derived definition of citizenship does not make space
for identifying citizens such as Hrant Dink, who participated as a citizen in the
Turkish state, but was, as he insisted, ‘not a Turk’.48 This definition points to the
generalized ethnic and cultural assumptions wrapped into the package of the indi-
vidual citizen, and can help dispel the notion that by including minorities as Turks
under the Constitution, they will therefore be treated as equals. In fact, the territor-
ial definition of citizenship is leveraged as an assimilation tool that makes all
Turkish citizens the same, while disregarding the unique needs of various minority
ethnic communities. The constitutional definition of citizenship in Turkey was the
subject of much debate as the country prepared for the 2011 elections, but as of this
writing, constitutional reform has not yet taken place. An article in Hurriyet
described constitutional reform proposals put forth by the Peace and Democracy
Party (BDP) that would include adding a clause to Article 66 saying that citizens
will not be discriminated against based on ethnicity but it has not been approved.49
 Democratization 781
The Turkish Constitution discriminates against its minority citizens in ways
that fundamentally contradict the protections given to them under the Lausanne
Treaty, signed between Turkey and the Allied powers in 1923. Under the treaty,
Armenians, Jews, and Greeks were to be allowed to have their own schools con-
ducted in minority languages, and the treaty obligated the Turkish government
to create public, minority language schools in any location that had a concentrated
population of one of these ethnic groups.50 Yet Article 3 of the Turkish Consti-
tution declares Turkish to be the national language, and Article 42 then makes it
illegal to conduct education in any other language, in direct conflict with the Lau-
sanne Treaty’s provisions.51 Though exceptions have been made for the Lausanne
minorities, as well as to allow English, French, Italian, and German-language
schools in Turkey, no ethnic minority language education is technically allowed
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under the Constitution. While the Lausanne minorities continue to supersede

various challenges to enforce the right to operate their own private schools in
their own languages, the only way to continue minority language acquisition for
Turkey’s other minorities is through inheritance or private classes.52 The fact
that even the Lausanne minorities have consistently struggled to obtain the
access to their languages that the treaty commanded highlights the dire situations
of Turkey’s non-Lausanne groups who also want the right to education in their own
languages, as well as the right to practice their own religious and cultural rituals.
If we take education to be a fundamental human right, as the United Nations
(UN) has declared it to be in Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights (UNUDHR),53 then Turkey’s policy of Turkish-only education violates
not only the Lausanne Treaty, but also UNUDHR’s Article 26. This Article
states that ‘education shall be directed to the full development of the human per-
sonality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental free-
doms’.54 Though the Turkish government may counter that it does provide
education to each citizen as per UNUDHR, by doing so only in Turkish the state
is negating the ethnic heritage and associated cultural epistemologies that accom-
pany language. This is but one of the ways that Armenians lack affirmation through
official institutions.
Though Armenians are, as citizens, granted the right to vote, they are too small
a population to elect an Armenian representative. Since the 1980s, even the choice
of their electoral college through which the Armenian Patriarch is chosen has been
dictated by Turkish government regulations, which insist that the fathers of elec-
toral delegates must be Turkish citizens.55 Generally, minorities in Turkey are
required to ‘be Turkish’, to assimilate, in order to access their rights. Challenging
the policy of assimilation, as Dink did, can lead to curtailed freedom through legal
channels, such as Penal Code 301, but the diminishing of identity shows how this
can happen more ephemerally. If Armenians refuse to accept the official Turkish
state memory about the events of 1915, their inability to be Turkish in this way
works against their ability to make rights claims as citizens.
Though individually citizens with guaranteed rights, Armenians’ collective
identity as an ethnic minority challenging state-sanctioned memory jeopardizes
 782 M. Gellman
their ability to access their full range of rights. Yet constitutionally, in Articles 12
and 17, Armenians, as Turkish citizens, have the protected rights to express their
identities through the right of liberty.56 The denial of a fundamental historical
event which shaped the legacy of Armenians for their descendents diminishes
their identity by negating it. Armenian Turks today must downplay their ethnic
identities in order to be welcomed into the arena of formal political participation.
To touch on a temporal dimension of Turkish citizenship, it should be noted that
a constitutionally derived notion of citizenship, and specifically Turkishness, is a
relatively recent phenomenon. In fact, ‘claims premised on a direct relation
between state and individual – date only to the middle decades of the nineteenth
century, when sultanic regimes attempted to transform both the coercive and con-
sensual means of rule’.57 Citizenship was not the main objective of major reforms
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during the Ottoman Empire, but provides an interesting historical backdrop for
understanding the way that contemporary Turkish citizenship has evolved.
During the Tanzimat reforms of 1836 – 1879, ‘the meaning of citizenship was con-
tinually reshaped by discussion and contention between majority and minority;
between individuals, semiautonomous bodies, and an emerging legal and public
sphere’.58 Now, as under the Tanzimat, citizenship continues to be a malleable,
powerful tool that is created, performed, and experienced in divergent ways by
Turkey’s residents. In addressing memories of violence in the Armenian commu-
nity of contemporary Turkey it is critical to unpack the meaning of citizenship
for minorities there, to better situate the challenges to identity-based political
participation, and to foreshadow the significance of the moments of dialogue dis-
cussed below.

Dialogue moments
As ethnic minorities in Turkey today try to exercise their rights and acquire recog-
nition in the public sphere, they face denial and blocked channels for dialogue.
However, a select solidarity community of elite scholars is trying to open the dia-
logue channels. This section presents recent moments of dialogue that illustrate
coalition-building between solidarity communities and descendents of violence
survivors in order to promote citizen participation in Turkey.

Official apologies
Apologies by governments to minority populations have caught on in recent years,
particularly among former British colonies: New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and
the United States have apologized in some way to their indigenous peoples and
Great Britain apologized to Ireland for its role in the potato famine.59 Less conso-
lidated democracies have also used apologies to address past grievances. The
Salvadoran government, led by Mauricio Funes, apologized in January 2010 for
the government’s role in El Salvador’s civil war. The lesson from these apologies
relevant to the discussion of Turkey is that they demonstrate the kind of language
 Democratization 783
and political space necessary to generate a discourse. Though democratizing
countries may still feel threatened by the people to whom the government has a
moral obligation to apologize, the act of powerful states apologizing has in a
sense paved the way for weaker states to do the same. In each case, the government
did not decide on its own to offer an apology, but rather prior civil society petition-
ing facilitated its manifestation. Turkey’s solidarity community may serve this peti-
tioning purpose as they offer a people-led apology that could bring enough
international attention to eventually shame the state into some degree of grievance
recognition.
As a verbal or textual arena in which states can address past offenses committed
towards specific populations, apologies can have the goal of promoting peace,
national cohesion, or simply increased credibility of the regime. Apologies fit into
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the theoretical framework of this article in that they are statements crafted by elite
actors in discursive arenas directed towards marginalized communities. As presented
earlier, Melissa Nobles argues that apologies can change the conditions of national
membership, in part because they ‘validate reinterpretations of history by formally
acknowledging past actions and judging them as unjust’.60 In line with her work, I
take apologies to be a type of dialogue fostering tool that can affirm memories inte-
gral to identity. In turn, this affirmation can induce a greater sense of belonging to,
and interest in, participating in the polity.
The relatively new apology movement in Turkey, though not state-led, has still
had a powerful effect on the discourse about memory in Turkey. Barkan terms the
apology trend in Turkey the rediscovery of guilt, which gains prominence the
more denial appears as a losing political strategy.61 Though these apologies do
not carry with them monetary compensation, they do affect the tenor of public dis-
course. Kevin Rudd, when he was Prime Minister of Australia, made the first ever
apology to Aboriginal Australians in 2008, shortly after he assumed office.62 The
impact of this apology was such that white Australians became more aware of the
colonial legacy of the country and the abuse that Aboriginal people suffered, and
continue to suffer, as a result of racist policies. Moreover, it had the effect of legit-
imizing Aboriginal people as valid citizens of the Australian state whose rights had
been violated. Though some people, including Aboriginals, say that apologies
should include reparations to address the inequalities that state-induced suffering
produces, it is undeniable that the verbal apology alone raised the level of debate
within Australia about the treatment of Aboriginal Australians.63 Even as the
Australian apology was transmitted through the media, discourses of the state’s
obligations and citizens’ rights came to life both in Parliament and at kitchen
tables. Why then could such a verbal arena not be the seat of discursive change
in the Turkish case?

An unofficial apology
The online apology petition, özür diliyorum,64 was started in Turkey in January
2009 by a small group of scholars and journalists. The text of the apology
 784 M. Gellman
campaign, spearheaded by Cengiz Aktar, head of EU Studies at Bahçeşehir Univer-
sity, and Ali Bayramoğlu, a prominent writer and public intellectual, is as follows:

My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the Great
Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915. I reject this injus-
tice and for my share, empathize with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers
and sisters. I apologize to them.65

Launched on 21 January 2009, more than 30,000 individuals signed the statement,
and the majority did so within the first month of its circulation.66 This apology is
significant on many levels, but I focus on the way that a coalition of elite actors
merged together to address an individual and community-held memory and
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rejected the Turkish state’s official policy of denial. Such an approach returns us
to the initial question this article explores: how do citizens participate in democra-
tization processes when state narratives challenge their own memories of violence?
While for many years of Turkey’s democratization Armenians were unable to
manifest sustained, contentious collective action, it seems that the support of soli-
darity communities in arenas of dialogue promotion has been integral to overcom-
ing participation stagnation.
Though acknowledging that the petition began as an elite discourse from
within the academic community, Aktar says it quickly stimulated public debate
and dialogue through dispersion on blogs and in newspapers.67 In fact, the main-
stream public reaction to the petition was harsh (but also evidence of its widespread
impact), with 11 counter-petitions formed online, saying things like ‘we are
ashamed of you for apologizing’.68 One of the counter-petitions garnered
upwards of 85,000 signatures, though doubts about the authenticity of the signa-
tures abounded. Regardless, the counter-petitions, particularly one crafted by
Turkish ex-diplomats, were widely publicized in the media, reinforcing the state
narrative of denial and illuminating the scale of the challenge to initiate dialogue
about the Catastrophe. Abundant hate mail and threats also came to initiators
and prominent signatories. On the one hand hate mail can also be considered
freedom of expression, like the apology petition itself, but threats to well-being
cross the line of expression, violating the recipient’s right to security. Sending
hate mail that carries threats is a fear tactic designed to limit contestation of citizen-
ship identity in Turkey and perpetuate unequal access to rights claims for Armenian
Turks and their solidarity communities. The menacing way that opponents rejected
the apology campaign can also be seen as indicative of incomplete democratization
regarding civil liberties in Turkey.
While the text of the apology addresses the incidents of 1915, it metaphorically
also addresses the problem of denial that has undermined Armenian identity for the
last century. The ability to ‘name the problem’, as Ferda Keskin of Bilgi University
puts it, is a compelling example of citizen participation in a rights-demanding form
that is a useful indicator of democratic quality in Turkey.69 Elite allies have clearly
played a pivotal role in fostering moments of dialogue, but this is often the case
 Democratization 785
when minority groups lack access to resources. By forming coalitions, individual
and collective actions support the expansion of minority group power while
furthering the elite agenda of increased democratization that entails greater
freedom of expression.
While the intricacies of how the apology campaign was perceived by Armenians
are not documented here, in general it seems that the campaign increased the will-
ingness of the Armenian community to open up to solidarity coalitions interested in
working with them. The apology campaign in this sense reinforced the sense of soli-
darity that began with the identity commonality seen at Hrant Dink’s funeral, where
Turks came out in the streets to support and speak out for the Armenian community.
However, the politics of these solidarity coalitions remain tense – as Aris Nalcı,
Redactor-in-Chief at Agos, put it – ‘there are people in the Turkish left who use
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the word genocide in private but the word catastrophe in public’.70 Though he
understands politically why solidarity activists make this kind of choice, Nalcı
noted that such language-swapping feels insincere and may prove to be a stumbling
block in building solidarity coalition strength.
Returning to Tilly’s coalition-building as a part of collective action, the
apology petition does denote a collective action, but also the importance of each
individual that makes up the collective. Academic and public intellectual Ahmet
Insel stated that ‘everyone signed this statement on their own conscientious
assessment . . . [T]here are as many motives for signing on as the number of signa-
tories’.71 Yet there is also a common platform on which the coalition can base its
action, namely ‘the need to face our history without having to bow to any taboo,
ban or pressure’.72 Keskin describes how, regardless of any personal connection
to the events of 1915, ‘by being a citizen of this nation-state, I feel bad about it,
and I apologize’.73 This shared response allowed individual actors to mobilize
together in the discursive arena. By joining forces with those who have less
access to power, elite-led solidarity communities use the apology as a discursive
tool to promote interaction in the arena of memory.
In some ways, textual dialogue can feel safer than face-to-face discussion
because of the ability to revise one’s words prior to them being publicized, and
mass movements provide a safety in numbers that can be comforting for people
unwilling to make controversial statements alone. The internet in this scenario
grants greater political expression and distribution, but was (and is) also used as
a mouthpiece for hate.74 By placing their names on the apology petition, Turkish
citizens are calling for increased discussion and revision of the national memory
as it pertains to the Armenian community. The act puts one’s reputation on the
line and essentially says, ‘I am ready to talk about things that are difficult.’
The 2007 funeral of Hrant Dink. While Dink, as seen in the opening vignette of
this article, could be rather blunt in his personal identity politics, his life’s work, as
shown through the creation of Agos newspaper, was dedicated to the idea of robust
democratic dialogue and identity pluralism. Though Turkish nationalists feared
Dink’s call for dialogue on both the history of Armenians in Turkey as well as con-
temporary ethnic minority rights, Dink was also instrumental in opening up greater
 786 M. Gellman
discourse about engaged citizenship within the Armenian community living in
Turkey. As a colleague wrote in a memorial edition of openDemocracy Quarterly
dedicated to Dink:

The bitter tragedy of his death is that Agos was an expression of his dedication to a
debate not with Turkish nationalists but with his fellow Armenians. He felt that
they were too much in the grip of the Armenian diaspora’s obsession with the geno-
cide between 1915–1917. He wanted to talk, write and publish about it freely and
honestly, of course. But with the hope of this allowing Armenians to become
normal, healthy citizens of a modern democratic Turkey.75

Hrant Dink’s death provoked a tremendous reaction from a heterogeneous

portion of Turkish society. People took to the Istanbul streets at his funeral –
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some estimate more than 100,000 – holding signs and chanting ‘we are all Arme-
nians’ and ‘we are all Hrant Dink’. At this particular historic moment, solidarity
transcended ethnicity in Turkey and allowed what Sidney Tarrow calls ‘conten-
tious collective action’ to take place; when people who normally do not have
access to political power via institutions gather together to voice a claim that chal-
lenges authority through sustained interface.76 For many Turkish people, the
funeral march was the first time they raised their voices in support of the Armenian
community in Turkey. For Armenians, the event marked the first time many saw
large scale identity solidarity from Turkish people who were generally thought
of as persecutors. Transcending ethnic boundaries and discursive divides in the
streets of Istanbul, people honoured the life of Dink while challenging the impunity
and violence of the deep state. Nearly everyone interviewed cited the funeral march
as a turning point in the relationship between Armenian activists and the elite
Turkish left. The momentum generated at Dink’s funeral continues today
through the Hrant Dink Foundation and various solidarity communities, such as
families of murdered Turkish journalists who protest in his name, and at court-
side demonstrations whenever Dink’s case is in front of a judge, organized by
mostly Turkish activists and intellectuals.
The 2005 conference on academic responsibility. Academic dialogue was
attempted most visibly through the conference entitled ‘Ottoman Armenians
during the Era of Imperial Decline: Academic Responsibility and Issues of Democ-
racy’, intended to take place at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul 25– 27 May 2005.
Organized by scholars from Boğaziçi, Bilgi, and Sabançi universities, the confer-
ence came under heavy scrutiny from both ruling and opposition parties of the
Turkish government that led to its delay. Der Matossian commented that the confer-
ence was ‘an important step for Turkish liberal historiography, because for the first
time since the founding of the Turkish republic in 1923, a meeting within a Turkish
university questioned the state narrative’.77
Nationalists were enraged at their narrative being questioned in this way, and
they let participants know it by throwing refuse at them as they entered the confer-
ence.78 Additionally, denialists complained to the public university where the con-
ference was first supposed to be held. Boğaziçi’s president received hate mail and
 Democratization 787
calls about the fact that tax dollars would be used for the event, which contributed
to the conference being moved to the privately funded Bilgi University.79 More-
over, a civil organization called the Jurists Union filed a petition to the courts
asking that the conference be shut down based on its potential to damage the
nation’s reputation, and two of three judges upheld the petition, citing rather trans-
parent denialist rhetoric to justify their decisions.80 Eventually, Bilgi University
held the conference on 24– 25 September 2005, but not before the Turkish govern-
ment had tried to ban it, with then Minister of Justice Cemil Çiçek (as of this
writing Speaker of the Parliament and affiliated with the Islamist party),81 describ-
ing it as ‘treason against Turkey’.82
This incident points to the perilous role of academia as an arena of free thought
and expression in a restricted though democratizing state. Individual elite actors
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have stepped into this arena to access their rights claims through expression that
challenges the state narrative, but they do so at risk of their jobs and reputations.
From the state perspective, however, limiting free speech is seen as imperative
to preserving historic truths within the collective memory. On the other side of
the argument, European legislation has made it illegal to deny the Holocaust,
thus using restrictions of freedom of expression to preserve integrity of the collec-
tive memory of state-sponsored violence.
In the case of Turkish and Armenian advocacy, if free speech is taken out of
academia and this link in the elite solidarity community network is dissolved, it
is uncertain if other arenas would host the voices of survivors’ descendents. Scho-
lars play key roles in relation to citizen expression and participation because they
pedagogically disseminate norms and discourses in classrooms, conferences, and
writings. However, US-based Turkish sociologist Fatma Müge Göçek observes
that when scholars engage with trauma and its historical actors:
[t]he conventional distance that scholars place between themselves and their texts is
no longer there; the strategic negotiation enables scholars to do a couple of things sim-
ultaneously: they capture the complexity of the trauma, contextualize it without nor-
malizing it, and, by reflecting on their own subject position during the process, are
able to clarify their ethical stand in relation to the trauma.83

Academics and other public intellectuals in Turkey hold a grave responsibility

to keep the dialogue process rolling despite extreme resistance from the Turkish
state. To draw on the language of the contentious politics literature,84 academics
facilitate dialogue within the arena of memory. Their role as elites in contesting
the state narrative appears indispensable to the momentum of the movement.
For democratizing countries like Turkey, owning up to the unjust origins of the
modern state is not yet going to happen at the regime level, but it is starting to happen
within civil society. EU scholar Ahmet Evin said he does not think memory should
inhibit the development of a modern nation state.85 Yet he concedes that in the
context of Turkey and the events of 1915, traumatic memory, for both the regime
and the Armenian community, does seem to be complicating the democratization
process.86 Oral historian Leyla Neyzi is more forthright in linking memory and
 788 M. Gellman
Turkey’s political development. ‘The modernization project in Turkey’, she asserts,
‘is about forgetting’.87 Elite solidarity coalitions challenge this reality by trying to
facilitate both democratization via EU channels, and memorialization of identity via
dialogue moments in Turkey.

Conclusion
In this article I have argued that what transpires in the memory arena informs pol-
itical participation, and that citizenship in Turkey is inextricably bound up with
identity in ways that can influence the quality of democracy. Dialogue about
memory is one tool that can expand participation space for all Turkish citizens.
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For Armenians, such dialogue may play a role in the reassertion of their right to
non-Turkish identity as a fundamental right of citizenship in Turkey.
I have described the role that solidarity communities play in creating coalitions
with Armenians, and have discussed memory and dialogue arenas as integral
spaces for emerging frameworks of collective action. Through fieldwork findings,
a snapshot of Turkey’s elite-led dialogue about the Armenian Catastrophe has been
created. The online apology petition of 2009, the funereal outpouring after the
death of Hrant Dink in 2007, and the 2005 academic conference were presented
as dialogue moments operating in arenas of memory that have opened up space
for ethnic minority and solidarity citizen expression. To be realistic, it is noted
that dialogue within select communities will itself not change political behaviour.
A wide swath of Turkish society exists outside the dialogue and in fact stands in
opposition to it. The claim here has been more subtle; that dialogue serves as a
window through which Armenians and members of solidarity communities can
glimpse other ways of being in relationship with each other. Dialogue is the first
step to engaging alternative ontologies.

Acknowledgements
I thank Mert Arslanalp, Edward Gibson, William Reno, and Joshua Dankoff for their
insightful comments on previous drafts of this article. Financial support for fieldwork
came from the Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies and the Keyman
Family Program in Modern Turkish Studies, for which I am grateful. An earlier version
of this article was presented at the International Praxis Conference on Cultural Memory
and Coexistence in Istanbul, 2011, whose participants provided helpful feedback, as did
two anonymous reviewers for this journal. I alone am responsible for any errors.

Notes
1. Cited in Mango, Turkey: A Delicately Poised Ally, 11.
2. Please note that throughout this article, the label ‘Armenian’ refers only to Armenians
living within the territory of Turkey.
3. Dink, ‘A Pidgeon-Like Unease of Spirit’, 27; Hilton, ‘Hrant Dink: An Opendemoc-
racy Tribute’.
4. Literary figure Orhan Pamuk has also been tried for denigrating Turkishness after
saying in an interview with the Swiss press that a million Armenians and 30,000
 Democratization 789
Kurds in Turkey have been killed – such an allegation constitutes a crime under Penal
Code 301 and is punishable by six months to three years in prison, see Belge, ‘The
Trials of Turkish Writers’.
5. Republic of Turkey, The Constitution of the Republic of Turkey, Articles 25, 26.
6. Young Civilians and Human Rights Agenda Association, Ergenekon Is Our Reality, 47–9.
7. For a brief primer on Ergenekon see ibid.
8. The notion of territorially derived, unshakable identity stretches back to the Ottoman
Empire. Article 8 of the 1876 Constitution reads: ‘All subjects of the Empire are
called Ottomans, without distinction, whatever faith they profess; the status of an
Ottoman is acquired and lost, according to conditions specified by law’, emphasis in
original, Salzmann, ‘Citizens in Search of a State’, 66.
9. Aminzade et al., Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics.
10. McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention, 24.
11. Higley and Gunther, Elites and Democratic Consolidation in Latin America and
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Southern Europe; Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy;

Rueschemeyer, Huber Stephens, and Stephens, Capitalist Development and
Democracy.
12. This role for elites indicates a level of civil society robustness that is important for
increasing citizenship participation in democratizing states. For opinions on this
debate, see Collier, Paths toward Democracy; Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism,
and Democracy; Viterna, ‘Pulled, Pushed, and Persuaded’.
13. Kaya, Forgotten or Assimiliated?, 8.
14. While Sunni Kurds are able to use religious commonality as a basis for assimilation,
this is not the case for Alevi Kurds, who are rendered outsiders by both their religious
and ethnic identities, as in the town of Dersim/Tunceli.
15. Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies.
16. Ibid., 36.
17. Ibid.
18. Lechner and Güel 1999, 194 –5, cited in Jelin, State Repression and the Labors of
Memory, 101.
19. The American Heritage College Dictionary, 850.
20. Antze and Lambek, Tense Past, vii.
21. Bloch, ‘Internal and External Memory’, 218.
22. Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism, 29.
23. Tilly, Democracy, 76 –7.
24. Digeser, Political Forgiveness, 112– 15.
25. See Antze and Lambek, Tense Past, xviii –xix for a discussion of this.
26. Derluguian, Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus, 189.
27. The way that the policy of denial affects the Armenian diaspora is quite different, as
diasporans are able to have the benefits of citizenship elsewhere while holding on to a
collective memory as a basis for ethnic identity. Armenians in Turkey, however, are
faced with this problem through daily disadvantages as citizens, such as having no
real representative government that speaks to their needs.
28. Coy and Woehrle, Social Conflicts and Collective Identities, 3.
29. Ibid., 7.
30. Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies, 36.
31. Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence, 103.
32. Ibid., 104.
33. See Mango, ‘Remembering the Minorities’, 276– 7, for a problematic juxtaposition of
Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis’ work on Armenian casualties to that of Justin
McCarthy; and Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, 140, for a breakdown of
several sources.
 790 M. Gellman
34. Damat Ferid Pasha decries the use of the term ‘deportation’, as the Armenians were
not resettled but driven out, thus he says ‘expelled’ would be a better description.
See Akçam, A Shameful Act, 267.
35. Müge Göçek, ‘Turkish Historiography and the Unbearable Weight of 1915’, 338.
36. Akçam, A Shameful Act.
37. Akçam received asylum in Germany in 1978 after breaking out of Ankara’s Central
Prison one year into a nine-year sentence that he received for being the editor of a
radical leftist journal.
38. Akçam, A Shameful Act.
39. International Association of Genocide Scholars, ‘Open Letter to Prime Minister of
Turkey’.
40. In everyday discussion it seems that this time period becomes compressed to just
1915, the year of the largest single massacre, though the whole time period was in
fact part of the catastrophe.
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41. Suny, Looking toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History, 217. Also Akçam, A
Shameful Act, 4.
42. Tilly, ‘Conclusion: Why Worry About Citizenship?’, 253.
43. Some scholars, such as Michele Penner Angrist have called Kurds Turkey’s ‘sole
significant ethnic minority’ (Penner Angrist, ‘Turkey: Roots of the Turkish-Kurdish
Conflict and Prospects for Constructive Reform’, 388), but members of the ethnic
and religious minority groups listed here might disagree with her.
44. CIA, ‘CIA World Factbook – Turkey’.
45. Kaya, Forgotten or Assimiliated?, 10.
46. Republic of Turkey, The Constitution of the Republic of Turkey, 3.
47. Ibid., 21.
48. Hilton, ‘Hrant Dink: An Opendemocracy Tribute’.
49. Daily News Parliament Bureau, ‘Pro-Kurdish Party Introduces Own Draft on
Constitution’.
50. Kaya, Forgotten or Assimiliated?, 8.
51. Republic of Turkey, The Constitution of the Republic of Turkey, 2, 14.
52. Kaya, Forgotten or Assimiliated?, 8–9.
53. United Nations General Assembly, ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’.
54. Ibid.
55. Minority Rights Group International, World Directoty of Minorities and Indigenous
Peoples – Turkey – Armenians.
56. Republic of Turkey, The Constitution of the Republic of Turkey.
57. Salzmann, ‘Citizens in Search of a State’, 38.
58. Ibid.
59. Barkan, ‘Can Memory of Genocide Lead to Reconciliation?’, 391.
60. Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies, 112, 174.
61. Barkan, ‘Can Memory of Genocide Lead to Reconciliation?’, 396.
62. BBC, ‘Full Text: Apology to Aborigines’.
63. Since in the Turkish case the notion of reparations is unimaginable at this point in time,
I try to evaluate the significance of the discursive arena alone, without taking on the
challenge of monetary calculations for state-induced violence.
64. The petition is available at http://www.ozurdiliyoruz.com.
65. Insel, ‘“This Conduct Was a Crime against Humanity”: An Evaluation of the Initiative
to Apologize to the Armenians’, 1.
66. Ibid.
67. Cengiz Aktar, Interview with Mneesha Gellman on 26 June 2009, Istanbul,
Turkey. Aktar has also published a book on this topic that provides background.
See Aktar, L’appel Au Pardon: Des Turcs S’adressent Aux Arméniens.
 Democratization 791
68. Aktar, Interview with Mneesha Gellman on 26 June 2009.
69. Ferda Keskin, Interview with Mneesha Gellman on 16 June 2009, Istanbul, Turkey.
70. Aris Nalcı, Interview with Mneesha Gellman on 22 July 2010, Istanbul, Turkey.
71. Insel, ‘“This Conduct Was a Crime against Humanity”: An Evaluation of the Initiative
to Apologize to the Armenians’, 2.
72. Ibid.
73. Keskin, Interview with Mneesha Gellman on 16 June 2009.
74. As an example of interactive popular media that can influence dialogue, the entry for
‘Armenian genocide’ in Wikipedia was vandalized, editing privileges restricted, and
the content declared disputed, showing how the politics of apology are far from
resolved, and the public discussion remains highly charged. Similarly, non-interactive
websites that deny the Armenian massacres, such as ‘tallarmeniantale.com’ have taken
to embedding photos from their sites in less political websites about Turkey in order to
get users to click the photo link, which then takes them to a distressingly denialist
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website.
75. Barnett, ‘Hrant Dink: Do Not Fear’.
76. Tarrow, Power in Movement, 2.
77. Der Matossian, ‘Venturing into the Minefield’, 382.
78. Fatma Gök, Meeting with Mneesha Gellman on 30 June 2009, Istanbul, Turkey.
79. Ibid.
80. Belge, ‘The Trials of Free Speech in Turkey’.
81. From 2003–2007, Çiçek served as Minister of Justice under the Justice and Develop-
ment Party (AKP), but he started his career as a Member of Parliament with the
Motherland Party (ANAP) in the 1980s.
82. In Der Matossian, ‘Venturing into the Minefield’, 382.
83. Göçek, ‘Turkish Historiography and the Unbearable Weight of 1915’, 355.
84. McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention.
85. Ahmet Evin, Interview with Mneesha Gellman on 23 June 2009, Istanbul, Turkey.
86. Ibid. Although Japan has long been democratic, it is interesting to note that contro-
versy over memory about sexual slavery during World War II contributed to former
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s resignation. From: Freedom House, Freedom in the
World – Japan. Also, for more on Japan’s unwillingness to apologize to China for
war crimes, perpetuating its isolation see Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies, 1.
87. Leyla Neyzi, Interview with Mneesha Gellman on 25 June 2009, Istanbul, Turkey.

Notes on contributor
Mneesha Gellman is a PhD candidate in political science at Northwestern University, USA.
Her current research focuses on ethnic minority rights mobilizations in Turkey and Latin
America, particularly after incidents of state and paramilitary violence.

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